The tables of contents, and some pretty extensive samples from both the guide and practice books, are available at the Beast Academy site. That might start giving you a feel for how the program differs from MM. http://beastacademy.com/store/

I think all the answers to these questions are in SWB's audio lecture about teaching writing in the elementary years. She describes the functions of copywork (and then dictation) pretty clearly. Looking at the sample from the instructor's text for WWE, I see it's pretty clearly laid out in there too, if you prefer text (and free!) ...The audio is a bit more thorough though.

Yay: Beast Academy. Story of the Romans, David Macaulay's City, and Good Times Travel Agency books for Ancient history. Notebooking across the "curriculum". It's looking like Grammar Island will be a hit, we just started today. Not so hot: Rhythm of Handwriting, AAS, Singapore math (we like them fine but we never seem to get to them.)

Interest-led investigations at the library, nature walks, and big juicy conversations. You could look at BFSU for ideas of things to talk about, and for explanations of phenomena.

I'm really enjoying MCT's Classics in the Classroom right now, enough to go trumpeting about it in a few different threads today it seems. :) He has a whole list of "thinking/feeling skills" based on Bloom's taxonomy that's suggested to use with literature discussions. I'm also just getting into the bit on higher-order thinking and Socratic teaching. Um...FWIW, Thompson recommends going to the source, Plato's Dialogues. He says you can start with the Apology.

LOL, sounds like when I was looking at the page for Delta Camp and my DS asked what it was about..."But *I* am a kid between 6 and 7 who loves math!" (Sadly he is probably not the caliber they are looking for, even if we could budget for the cost! Ah, well.)

I disagree. It is definitely possible to apply higher order thinking (and I don't mean word problems) and do legitimate problem-solving with mathematical problems that require only the four elementary operations. It is also possible to branch out to math other than addition and subtraction (geometry, number theory, counting, patterns, combinatorics) with a student who's not yet formally approached multiplication or division, for example. Now, as to whether the student will get the most benefit if they get higher-order problems while concepts are still new or if it's just as good to cover a lot of concepts with straightforward exercises and then save problem-solving fun for a supplement after the fact...I'm sure there's a lot of different cases to be made. At the moment I find I'm most comfortable playing with concepts as they arise and while they're still new, so that, say, addition and subtraction are "what we can use to figure out digit sums and order of operations" rather than just being "that baby stuff we have to get over with before we get to algebra and calculus."

Thanks for sharing! I sometimes feel like most of the families on the board were either set on homeschool from the start, or found their school experiences to be just completely unacceptable. The families who successfully afterschool for a while before switching, and partners who start out skeptical but "come onboard", seem few and far between! I'm considering taking a tour of the local Montessori-inspired private school. It's a 30 minute drive each way and over $5000 per year per child. If it becomes apparent that PS won't suit our kids any longer, it'll probably come down to that or home...maybe finances will be the final straw here too. ;) Good luck with your new adventure!

I was reading MCT's "Classics in the Classroom" last night and thought of this thread. "Those literary terms, helpful though they be, are not what to do; reading the book is what to do." "Any book worth its salt will provide you with the terms for its own interpretation." "Classic authors do not write...[their books] hoping to be STUDIED." "I do think that such terms should be one part of what students learn, but we need not deceive ourselves that such helpful concepts are the path to enlightenment. That path is left by the author within the book, and if we do not make ourselves transparent and take the author's path, then it is pointless to look for external assistance in understanding the book."

Here's a recent thread about compacting math resources. http://forums.welltrainedmind.com/topic/506620-the-nuts-and-bolts-of-compacting-curriculum/ This was tough for me too, looking at the materials and my kid and others' kids and asking, "How does acceleration actually *happen*?". At first I was just plugging slowly through the boring math and providing lots of fun supplements as counterpoints to the tedium. But between the supplements and his intuition the boring basics got so much more boring over time. So now I'm doing a minimal number of exercises in each section, verifying that DS gets the concepts I think he gets, but then moving on. In Singapore we crunch through most of a chapter in the text, skim and cherry-pick the workbook exercises, and then maybe linger a couple of days in that section of the IP. In Beast Academy a guide section sometimes has 12 or more pages of practice on subtly different kinds of problems (a page or two of each). So we'll read the guide, then choose a practice section and do enough problems to get it (usually 1-2 regular problems and all starred problems) then put it away. The next time we read the guide again, then choose the next practice section. I love how my repetition-hating kid will embrace a re-run of the BA guide! He thinks through the embedded problems every time. And of course, some days we just choose "the really interesting green books" and have a conversation about what the Borac competitive math books are showing us today. :) By ability and by choice and by circumstance, we're not nearly as accelerated as some. But I feel confident my kid is working at the level he needs to be. :) As an aside I will offer my favorite quotation on the concept of being so good at math that you just fly right through it. "Mathematics isn't meant to be easy; it's meant to be interesting." At the very least I'd get *something* into your routine that your bright little one can really chew on, so she can start getting a taste for *mathematics* and not just "doing math problems".

We don't have AR, and reading time is only informally rolled into homework expectations. First and second graders are expected to read or be read to for 15-25 minutes per day, which is included in a total of 25-30 minutes of daily homework. My son actually averages about 45 minutes per day that I log on his "reading competition" calendar. I figure I probably miss some, since he often drifts away into a magazine or something when I'm not looking. In October a 30-45 minute average was enough to make him the most prolific reader in the whole first grade. I didn't turn in a calendar from November through January, so we'll see how his February minutes stack up. :)

Funny enough, this book is about how to read difficult works non-sequentially (to summarize the approach he advises reading the table of contents, skimming to catch the main ideas and mark the difficult passages, then reading faster through the easier sections and taking time over the difficult ones) as well as about how to ask ever-deepening levels of questions to yourself about the book so that you are aware of the structure...then of the logic in the argument...then of the *quality* of the argument. :) And it is, indeed, the sort of book you need to tackle this way!

Honestly, whenever you move to a new area, it's the right choice, like 90% of the time, to rent for a year before you decide where and what to buy. Will your husband be doing a second-look interview? Can you and the family go out, meet a realtor, drive around a little and get a feel for the area before you make huge decisions? I've made several long-distance moves but never completely sight-unseen.

It definitely comes from your side of the family, but it could have been your mother who was a carrier. I don't think my husband ever asked for official college-level ADA-type accommodations in the course of obtaining his Biochemistry degree, but he may have asked for a little understanding or assistance from his profs. In graduate school he did struggle a bit with Histology but achieved a passing grade. He also has had me check his outfit on St. Patrick's day for the past 16 years. ;)

I think you're taking the passage out of context. The next three pages in the sub-section elaborate on the concept, and so does the sub-section after. He takes reading for understanding, for self-improvement, as a completely different thing than reading for learning and knowledge. And reading for understanding, reading to increase the understanding that you originally had, requires an author and a written material that you need to stretch to be worthy of. If you're not stretching, then the author wasn't superior to you, OR their insights were already known to you, and their mind cannot inform your mind. Keep looking for the reading material from which you CAN gain more understanding, or even enlightenment. "We do not want to give the impression that facts, leading to increased information, and insights, leading to increased understanding, are always easy to distinguish." If you read a history of the Ukraine and then sit down and puzzle out the connections between that history and the current political situation, then the written history did not afford you any specific insight that didn't originate in your brain. The reading of it didn't increase your understanding -- your own sharp mind did that. But if a person with a truly superior mind and a truly unusual perspective on the Ukraine conflict writes an article/essay/book that draws together his or her own perspective on how history and current events interrelate, then the *truly unusual* part means that you might just have to sit and cogitate to figure out not what facts they're conveying, but how THE AUTHOR sees those facts; what THEY understand, that YOU may come to understand it, because you didn't to begin with. Remember that he's not really talking about just any book being worthy of this deep level of reading. He's mostly talking about Great Books. How about replacing the "gain understanding" with "gain enlightenment"? You must presuppose that the work is capable of endowing enlightenment. I diagrammed the first sentence of the Declaration when I was in eighth grade and sang the second sentence in tenth, so I know what you mean; familiarity does sometimes breed contempt, so the Declaration may not have been a good example. ;) Can you, perhaps, give an example of a Great work that was completely intelligible to you, without any single sentence that was worth a re-read and a consideration, from which you nonetheless increased your understanding of the author's views and of the world? Nan, thank you for mentioning Thoreau, because I just picked up Civil Disobedience and I think it's a great example for our libertarian friend Chuck. Surely even if the topic of the essay didn't change one's opinion per se, the content of the argument would be worth the reader's deeper consideration? But if he, too, finds himself in such perfect accord with Emerson that not a single angle of his argument nor a single turn of phrase is enlightening, then perhaps a "syntopical" reading of Thoreau, along with the works excerpted in the back of HtRaB from Aristotle and Rousseau, could set up some bit of resonance that could deepen one's understanding of ideas that you already took for granted. :)

I love Adler! I'm due for a re-read. My translation would be, if you read a treatise or essay (especially a philosophical treatise or a persuasive essay) and your only reaction is "Duh," or "Cool, I didn't know that," then you've either remained unchanged in understanding or you've increased a little in knowledge but haven't affected your understanding. If your reaction is, "Wait, is he saying what I think he's saying? Why is he saying that? Do I agree, does it make sense?" and you puzzle through it -- not resorting to Google, or a textbook, or an expert, or a message board ;) but just in a dialogue between your brain and the words on the page -- then you've grown in understanding. Was "Duh," or "Cool," your reaction when you first read the Declaration of Independence, for example? If so, do you think that your reading of it improved your understanding of the authors' views on mankind and government and tyranny?

Single digit arithmetic: superficial is a page of problems. 2 + 1, 3 + 5, 4-2 etc. Slightly less superficial is a word problem: if 2 bees are on the flower and 2 more land, how many bees? Starting to engage higher order thinking is a problem like, "3_1_4_2=2, put the addition and subtraction symbols in the blanks so that the sentence is true."

It was posted on one of the general boards. It reminds me both of the Calculus Trap and of Lockhart's Lament. This about sums it up for me. The title "5 year olds can learn calculus" makes me cringe, because of the Tiger Mom aspect, and because it supports the idea that calculus is the pinnacle of mathematical education. But I also know that a lot of folks in WTM circles are so adamant about learning math facts at these young ages that they'd dismiss these ideas for that reason. The balance in the middle, showing the fun of higher math but not neglecting the fun of simple arithmetic and shape patterns and counting and logic, is what I'm questing for with my kids.

A team in my local area does this competition (at the Scout level): http://www.marinetech.org/rov-competition-2/

7:07pm Pacific...just briefly.

With some caveats, I agree with your friend. Not about grades, I don't feel "getting a B" is either here nor there, but about challenge. I think that all students are done a disservice if they are led to believe that mathematics has anything to do with doing the problems and getting the right answer (but I accept that for some kids, this "school math" is already a stretch). But I think that accelerated students are particularly cheated if any more than a third of the problems they see are the "plug-and-chug" type: http://www.davidsongifted.org/db/Articles_id_10687.aspx

Have you considered that the disinterest in things for which he has no prior experience, may be more developmental than personality-based? The "click" at age 6.5-7, which a lot of people see, is a pretty cool thing. A lot of people also hit a point around this age where they see that their bright child engaging better with abstract stuff than concrete stuff, and they see that they don't need a lot of repetition to learn. Parents then start exploring the possibility of compacting introductory curriculum in order to pave the way to the "good stuff". Search this forum for "compacting" -- when I did, I found 54 threads.

It's not that he's six per se, it's that there's a world of wonder out there and twelve years, give or take, to get through school stuff, whether school stuff for your particular kid means building a fusion reactor in the garage and writing the next great American novel or just trying to scrape together the minimum graduation requirements before he's 19. There's just not a rush, IMO. That's why I would say you do want to look at what you are accelerating TOWARD. What's the big picture here? When I start to freak out about the delicate task of handling surprisingly bright kids, I come to this board for a reality check. My kids are probably not going to qualify for Epsilon Camp or Delta Camp. They're not going to be doing competitive Latin exams and going to college lectures at 9. They're bright but we have time to work this out. People do work this out -- this and more. Look back through this board and find out what the kids who DO meet these impressive qualifications were doing when they were 6.

It almost feels heretical since science is a passion for me and for my kids but I'm shifting this direction. Even more heretical since I'm an eclectic atheist, I'm being swayed by the Christian Classical educators who point out that the "seven liberal arts" were originally hierarchical -- the quadrivium was studied atop a *foundation* of the trivium. Logic and rhetoric train the mind to do an investigation in a meaningful way. That doesn't mean you can't open your eyes and look around and wonder, but I'm shying away more and more from the "scientific method for first graders" model that misrepresents this hierarchy of learning and understanding. So, personally (still so early in the journey that I'm not technically homeschooling yet, LOL), here's my current iteration of goals for science. I'm hoping to get the hang of BFSU well enough to get through Volume III by the end of eighth, with accelerated-kid-appropriate depth -- mainly using the books to give me some sparks of ideas for topics and threads of investigation to suggest and areas of the library to look at each week. I'm hoping to do a science-fair-quality investigation once or twice a year (maybe starting in second or third). I'll buy my kids a telescope, and a microscope, and some stuff they can take apart and put back together, maybe some basic glassware, and I'll start getting more serious about nature study during our frequent walks. Fortunately between my husband (Bio major turned Biochem major) and myself (Physics major) we have the sciences covered and what we don't already know we can easily model interest about. Looking back, I didn't get science of any flavor (except, self-directed, one quasi-impressive science fair project in 4th and one research paper about cancer in 6th) until junior high. I don't remember 7th grade science, but in 8th I remember learning to juggle, building mousetrap powered vehicles, and learning to operate a bunsen burner well enough to shape our own glassware (we made and used our own personal glass stir rods). My 9th-11th college prep honors sequence of Bio/Chem/Physics was solid, and I had a strong foundation for college. But do you know what I didn't have? An inquisitive spirit. A personal history of wondering what was going on in the world and poking around to see what I could find out. Every single lab-based course I ever took in college, I fumbled through and in my gifted-kid perfectionism, ended up throwing the class. "I didn't even try, that's why I barely scraped a C." I also didn't have any sense of the development of science through history. One of my early college physics profs would throw in biographical details about the people whose names were on units of measurements or who'd made significant breakthroughs relating to our topic of study. This was all in one ear and out the other. "Will this be on the test?" Oh, the shame I feel about that now. I think a human touch on the threads of science would make the whole experience so much more vivid and meaningful and take the edge off of that "science is a thing that you're doing wrong if you don't get the expected answer" perfectionism, seeing how science has always been a little messy. So that's another part of my goal, to keep some science biographies flowing during the elementary years, and maybe to shift toward some primary sources in math/science/philosophy by middle school to early high school. Context, yo. Just some proto-homeschooler, regretful-gifted-kid thoughts...

Chapter 2 of US edition is about Number Bonds. The HIG suggests that this unit be approached deliberately and not rushed. It advises not leaving the unit behind until the student knows "most" of the number bonds for 1-10 -- but don't hang out so long you bore the student. So for me and my kiddo, I opted to put the workbook away for a while after we did the clown number bond pages, and instead we just talked about "making 10" a lot during our day, and played with Cuisenaire rods a lot, and watched Education Unboxed. When she started spontaneously telling me that if she had 8 pennies she needed 2 more to get a 10 cent candy, or if I flashed 4 fingers at her she could tell me she needed 2 more to 6, and built lots of trains with rods (including a big square of trains to build 10), then I judged us ready to move on. It probably took a few weeks, but we don't school daily by any means. The HIG would be cheaper than a whole new curriculum, amirite?